Private security firms bid on Greek asylum centres

BRUSSELS – Private security firms are bidding to guard EU-funded migrant detention centres in Greece amid a report by Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), which says poor conditions in some of the facilities are causing disease.

Greek authorities received EU money to refurbish and renovate Fylakio Oresteiadas, a pre-removal detention centre located in a remote area near the Turkish border.

Greece now wants to outsource its security, along with two other pre-removal centres in Corinth and Paranesti Dramas, to a private security firm for €14 million a year.

Fylakio was among others included in a scathing MSF report out on Tuesday (1 April).

Detained migrants and asylum seekers are suffering from medical problems caused or aggravated by poor conditions, the length of detention, and the lack of consistent or adequate medical assistance, it says.

“Most of the diseases I treat are connected to the detention circumstances. For example, it is too humid – I have seen patients who sleep on completely wet mattresses,” said one MSF doctor, cited in the report.

Michael Flynn, who runs the Global Detention Project at the Swiss-based Graduate Institute of International Studies, says outsourcing detention facilities to private security companies is a growing phenomenon.

“There should always be a concern when a state invites a for-profit contractor into the management structure of something like immigration-related detention,” he said.

Introducing private contractors shifts the policy focus away from the well-being of migrants to the bottom line of a company, he said.

“This is inevitable, this is just the nature of business,” he said.

The well-being of those detainees, according to the MSF report, is already being neglected despite the around €35 million Greece received last year from the EU’s return fund.

The money is supposed to help voluntary return and reintegration programmes but the bulk of the money is said to have gone to border control and detention centres.